Truth and Trust; untruth especially in oppressive regimes

Speakers: Iyra Buenrostro-Cabbab (University of the Philippines), Stanley Griffin (University of the West Indies), Susan Stuart (Philosopher) and Sarah Tyacke (Independent)

This webinar is one of a series of six organised by the British Records Association Advocacy of Archives Group which will be held during 2021 and 2022.  The aim of the series is to raise and debate questions surrounding the criticality and value of archives and records as information and evidence. questions such as: 

• What does the record - be it in hard copy paper format, digital or other media - mean to us? 
• Why should we be concerned about its survival? 
• How can the authenticity and significance of records be assessed? 
• How can perceived barriers to the access and use of records be broken down?

This webinar will broaden our views of what archives are and what they can mean to people as well as providing evidence of lives and experiences lived in different circumstances and cultures across the world.  It will demonstrate that we need more than traditional, text-based archives if we are to capture the lived experiences of people. It will also offer a penetrating analysis of truth and post truth and shows that things are different from the headlines and soundbite views of events.

A panel of experts will debate these critical issues: each bringing wide experience and knowledge of these matters and there will be the opportunity for participants to raise questions.

Iyra Buenrostro-Cabbab (Speaker) is a Lecturer at the School of Library and Information Studies, University of the Philippines Diliman. She will give an overview of the situation in the Philippines in the post-Marcos era and the various memories and views about this period. Iyra will then discuss the work she has done using photographs of this period, and how these are reactivated through listening to capture the voices and experiences of people who were political prisoners during the Marcos regime. 

Presentation Title: Listening to Photographs: Archives, Voices and Memories from the Margins

Stanley Griffin (Speaker) is a lecturer and Deputy Dean (Faculty of Humanities & Education) at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica. An archivist, cultural analyst and historian, Stanley has degrees in history, cultural studies and archives and records management from the University of the West Indies (Barbados) and University of Dundee (Scotland) respectively.  He will be talking about colonial era archives and the archives of Rastafari and how archives which normally deal in texts need to change to capture the history of what is essentially an oral culture. 

Presentation Title: The ‘Noise’ of the ‘Silenced’: Exploring the Duality of Caribbean Records

Susan Stuart (is a philosopher, formerly of the University of Glasgow & The Open University, who will argue that to concentrate on ‘post-truth’ is to lose our focus on ‘untruth’, and it is the propagandization of untruth which has a greater significance for the destabilisation of our customary modes of being. Presentation Title: The deceit of post truth 

David Thomas was formerly Director of Technology at The National Archives UK. He has a long interest in the use and misuse of archives and has published extensively on silences and absences in archives.

Sarah Tyacke (Chair) was formerly Chief Executive and Keeper of Public Records, The National Archives, and subsequently a member of the Independent Panel established by the Government to report on the Hillsborough Football Disaster 1989, in which 96 people died, and chair of the Fund for the International Development of Archives (FIDA) for the International Council on Archives. 

IHR Partnership Seminar Series: The Shock of the Record: archives and truth